In the first study to experimentally investigate the phenomenon, researchers say it’s the unfulfilled ambitions of moms and dads that fuel their pushy parenting.

Tigers moms and sports dads, according to the investigation published in the journal PLOS One, are trying to mitigate their own failures by living through their children. That’s not entirely surprising, but, as study co-author Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University says, “Our research provides the first empirical evidence that parents sometimes want their child to fulfill their unfulfilled ambitions—for example, that they want their child to become a physician when they themselves were rejected for medical school.”

Stereotypes portray the teen brain as an out-of-control car with “no brakes, no steering wheel, and only an accelerator,” says APS Fellow BJ Casey. Research shows that teenagers take risks because reward centers develop more quickly than control centers in their brains. But changes in the adolescent brain ultimately help prepare teens to become independent of their parents. APS Fellow Ruth Feldman, Clancy Blair, and Angela L. Duckworth also speak about self-regulation across the lifespan in APS President Nancy Eisenberg’s 2015 Presidential Symposium.

Regulation – a multilayered construct defined by the interplay of excitation and inhibition –undergoes substantial development across the first decade of life, is supported by bottom-up processes, and matures in […]